Charles Robert Maturin: Commentary & Quotations
James Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy, or Bardic Remains (2 vols., 1831), writes of Maturin that he died with a broken heart, after having been made made the dupe of a party of religious bigots in Dublin, who, with all the bitterness of sectarian zeal, prevailed on him to preach a series of shallow Sermons against popery, for which he was laughed at by many, and pitied by all. This bigoted coterie, from the mitred prelate to the bible-reading votaries of the tea-table, afterwards suffered the man of genius to die in comparative want. When Sir Walter Scott, after his arrival in Dublin, visited Maturins widow, he burst into tears at her situation. This affecting incident does honor to the feelings of that distinguished man. (Memoir of Thomas Furlong, Irish Minstrelsy, IUP Rep. Edn., Vol. 1, 1971, p.lxxvi, ftn.) Hardiman further remarks that Furlong and Maturin had long been on terms of closest intimacy, citing one from several letters of this talented individual to Mr. Furlong, in which Maturin speaks of the death of Furlongs father and also of having been prevented from writing by inflammation of the eyes necessitating mercury treatment. [lxxv-lxxvi.]
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, Vol. 2 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980): Little is known of the life of Irelands most famous romantic novelist, b. Dublin 1780, where his father was in the Post Office; his family had emigrated from France at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, studied theology; curate of Loughrea and St. Peters; d. subsequent to accidental poisoning; sons, Basil and Edward. See also Rafroidi (1980), Vol. 1: Charles R Maturin preached five sermons on the errors of Roman Catholicism, and certain passages in Melmoth (1820), could be taken as a pamphlet against the Inquisition, though tinged here and there with mystic fervour and fascination with Catholic rites [61]; Further, Maturin, in creating Connal (The Milesian), the descendant of the Milesians, spoke of a nation where feudalism was not dead, and the question of legitimacy or illegitimacy of its overlords was still a reality, all the more impassioned since it involved a religious aspect. [64]; ... Anglo-Irish fiction treating of terror, born of a society steeped in anxiety, flourished so well in fact precisely because it found fertile ground in Ireland. How could it have been otherwise? [64]. Rafroidi (Vol 2) lists works as above [Works], but adds a note on The Universe (London: Colburn 1821), 108pp, to the effect that it was Rev. J Willis [sic, for Wills] who wrote it, authorising his colleague to publish it in his name [not proved]. (See also under References.)
Claude Fierobe, A Gothic-Historical Sermon, Maturins Last Novel, The Albigenses, in Barbara Hayley and Chris Murray, eds., Ireland and France, A Bountfiul Friendship, Essays in Honour of Patrick Rafroidi (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992): compares Walpolian [novels] with his gothic novels with his religious writings (Sermons, 1[8]19, and Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church, 1824) in the context of his west of Ireland ministry at Loughrea, Co. Galway, and St. Peters, Dublin. Quotes Maturins defence of supernatural tales, in Sermons, 1819, The very first sounds almost that attract the ears of childhood are tales of another life - foolishly are they called tales of superstition [&c., as infra; here 47.). Further quotes Maturins letter to the publishers Hurst & Robinson, I have studiously avoided the faults so justly charged on Melmoth and tried to form myself on the style of my friend Sir Walter Scott. (Brit. Mus., MS Add., 41996.) [48] Fierobe cites four French works studied by Maturin in preparation for his Albigenses. [49] Maturin characterises the Roman Church as the parent of inquisitors, persecutions and a hatred passing the hatred of man. (Sermons, p.400.) ... Maturins sympathy for the Albigenses originates in his detestation of the Catholic Church, and it is therefore to be expected that the Catharists tenets should be more Puritan than Manichean. (p.54.) Maturin accused of blasphemy in Melmoth by J. W. Croker, reviewing it in The Quarterly Review, XXIV, 48 (Jan 1821.) Fierobe quotes Maturin, He who is capable of writing a good novel ought to feel that he was born for a higher purpose than writing novels. (Preface, The Wild Irish Boy, London: Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808, vol. I, p.11; here p.54.) Further, the Bishop, who is confronted with his evil by Genevieve in a characteristic exemplum of the relation between the spiritually bankrupt and the true transcendental, dies consuming a poison host. (~pp.55-56.) [ top ] Joseph Spence, The Great Angelic Sin: The Faust legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.47-58: A proud defender of the Anglo-Irish tradition, Maturin was ambivalne about the Act of Union of 1801, by which Ireland had lost her native parliament. He sometimes acknowledged the Union as an economic necessity, but, psychologically, he saw in it the Anglo-Irish Ascendancys desertion of its national duty. (p.47); What of the Irishness of the Melmoths? The first Melmoth to settle in Ireland was a Cromwellian soldier, who was soon visited by an elder brother, who [48] left him his portrait, dated 1646. Over the next century reports were head that this brother, Melmoth the Wanderer, was still alive. Introduced as an Englishman, the Wanderer was later written of as Irish. This succinctly betrayed Maturins conception of Irish nationality as a state which could be assumed by the Englishman, whenever he chose. With the depositing of his portrait in Wicklow, Melmoth donned the mantle of Irish nationality: henceforth he was an Irishman, without qualification, in his creators eyes. / However if the Irishness of the Melmoth family is disputable, the Irishness of the novel is not ... (p.49); [...] At the end of his extended lifespan, Melmoth retained the appearance of ascendancy, but he could no longer see where to go: his natural force was not abated, but his eyes were the eyes of the dead. The years allotted to him (1666-1816) had run parallel to those of Protestant Ascendancy, but the last years were years of impotence, in which the Anglo-Irish lived as the Undead. In Maturins vision, it was not just the Union that had broken their ascendancy but also the progressive relief of Catholic disabilities. Many of Maturins characters confessed to anti-Catholic objections and, in his last sermons, he described the degradation of Catholic Europe as the inevitable consequence of a self-destructive religion which meant to be an assassin, but became a suicide. In fact, Anglo-Ireland was the suicide. When Melmoth plunged from a cliff into a raging sea, Maturin expressed a belief that, in signing the Act of Union, the Anglo-Irish had committed political suicide. Such a reading follows the novels chronology, but it is also feasible to read Melmoth as prophecy rather than history: the pre-Union events it details being metaphors for events expected to occur after 1800. The signing of the Act of Union becomes, in this reading, not the end, but the beginning of a story, and as Melmoth sold his soul for extended life, so the Anglo-Irish were seen to sell their nationhood for that English support which could extend (but not indefinitely) the duration of their Ascendancy. In either reading, the story of the fall of Melmoth represented the fall of Anglo-Ireland. (p.50.)
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton UP 1997), [...] This myth of survival in destruction is foundational not only for the poetics and vernacular revivals of the late-eighteenth century but also for a long series of novelistic genres, from the sentimental and the Gothic novel to the historical novel. The dying bard in Charles Maturin's Milesian Chief (1812), for example, figures the death of Irish court culture under English occupation, anchoring undying feudal loyalties and memories of a former national glory. One of a staff of domestic bards retained by the O'Morven family in their castles across Ireland, he was forced to leave their service during the civil wars and returns now, after years of wandering, to die under the shelter of our walls. He was blind, but his memory was faithful to the path that led us home. Resting among some ruins, he learns that they are all that remains of [quotes:] the roof under which he had lived and under which he had hoped to die. But even this hope failed him, and he felt his age more helpless, and his blindness darker than when he sat down among the ruins.... Before he expired on the spot, he poured out his grief to his harp in a strain addressed to the solitary tenant of the ruins - the doves, whose notes the music seems to imitate. The words are beautiful, but I will not be guilty of doing them into English: their untranslatable beauty is like what we are told of the paintings of Herculaneaum, which preserve their rich colours in darkness and concealment, but when exposed to the light and modern eyes, fade and perish.. / Maturin reenacts this paradox of memory and obliteration. His bard dies with no one to hear his final song, yet the song, somehow, is preserved anyway, so that at the end of the eighteenth century it is still known to the Milesian chief. The chief (and Maturin after him) declines to translate the fragile strains, lest in the exposure to modern, English eyes they fade and perish. / Maturin's early-nineteenth-century evocation of bardic nationalism is informed explicitly by the events of the 1790s. His novel ends with the United Irishmen rebellion and with the execution of the Milesian chief; revolutionary unrest is both the logical-extension and the death sentence of cultural nationalism. (p.9.)
[ top ] Claire Connolly, Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. I [Chap. 10] - Prose fiction: [...] Maturins The Wild Irish Boy balances precariously between heartfelt emotion and camp display. [...] Across this period, Gothic gives way to historical fiction but in the case of the Irish novel the latter form retains within it important elements of the former. The interpenetration of these modes can be witnessed in the novels of the Dublin-born Protestant cleric Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824): Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Milesian Chief (1812), Women; or Pour et Contre (1818), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and The Albigenses (1824). Maturin's family origins lay in the Huguenot flight from religious persecution in seventeenth-century France. The relation between religious and state power concerns him everywhere in his novels, and provides the backdrop for dynamic fictions of persecution and flight. Maturin's novels allow us to see the evolution of Irish Gothic as a fictional idiom in which excessive forms of subjective experience (passion, terror, starvation) compel the invention of new structures of feelings within which political affiliation can be reimagined. (pp.418; see also bibliog. note, seq.) [For longer extracts, go to RICORSO Library, Irish Critical Classics, via index or direct.)
[ top ] Jarlath Killeen, Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction, in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1 (Oct. 2006): [...] Maturins Five Sermons on the Errors of Catholicism (1824) released his vitriolic outpourings of hatred on the Catholic Church, and as a nationalist his greatest fear must have been a union between the religion he despised, the people he distrusted (native Irish), and the cause he espoused. Yet, Maturin uses the figure of Melmoth, a symbolic Irishman, to make the most malicious attack on Roman Catholicism in the novel. In Volume III Part XIV, Melmoth explains to Immalee, his island lover, what religion is, and shows her all the religions of the world. His discourse is, of course, not an objective account, and he claims that Judaism, Hinduism and Catholicism are religions typified by their dedication to sadism and masochism, while Protestantism is presented as the religion of benign truth. Thus, violent anti-Catholicism lies at the centre of the novel; yet, as Chris Baldick points out, Protestant truth is proclaimed by the most reviled figure of the narrative, the Wanderer himself [Baldrick, ed., Melmoth the Wanderer, OUP 1989, Introduction, pp.xiv-xv]. It is Maturins villain who is the most consistent Protestant in the whole novel (while simultaneously representing all banished and exiled figures, including Irish Catholics), which surely tells against his claims that it is Protestantism which is the means to salvation. [online; 21.11.2007]. [ top ]
Quotations The Milesian Chief (London: Colburn 1812, 4 vols.; Do. facs. rep. (NY Garland 1979) - Dedication: If I possess any talent, it is that of extreme darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed. In the following pages I have tried to apply these powers to the scenes of actual life: and I have chosen my own country for the scene, because I believe it is the only country on earth, where, from the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united, and the most wild and incredible situations of romantic story are hourly passing before modern eyes. (p.iv-v.; quoted [in part] in Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980, Vol. I, p.265; also cited in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons & John Hill, Cinema and Ireland, ed. London: Routledge 1988 [q.p.]; also in Rolf Loeber & Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006 [Intro.], p.li, citing Rafroidi, as supra); also in Jarlath Killeen, Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction, in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1 (Oct. 2006 - online), citing The Milesian Chief, intro. Robert Lee Wolff, NY/London: Garland Publishing 1979, Vol. 1, p.iv. [Garland p.v). Also quoted inFernando Bezerra Brito, Melmoth the Wanderer: un sermão gótica irlandês [thesis] (USP 2013) - available online [www.teses.usp.br/ ... &c.] - accessed 12.12.2108]
Defence of supernatural tales: The very first sounds almost that attract the ears of childhood are tales of another life - foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised by the vulgarity of the narration, and the distortion of the fiction, they tell him of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of life to join, the inhabitants of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be, and be forever. And what an echo does the narrative find in the sensibility even of infancy! Long before the child has sense to apprehend the distinctions, the distinction of life and death, and dreads the thought of the inmates of a future state, whom imagination paints like their remainscold, pale, and frightful. (Sermons, Edinburgh: Constable; London: Hurst, Rob. & Co., 1819, p.359) [47] [ top ] Melmoth the Wanderer [1820] (1961 Edn., Nebraska UP): The lodge [i.e., Melmoth house in Wicklow] was in ruins, and a bare-footed boy from an adjacent cabin ran to lift on its single hinge what had once been a gate but was now a few planks so villainously put together, that they clattered like a sign in a high wind... As John slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing desolation since he had last visited the spot. (pp.6-7.) Further, [W]alls broken down, grass-gown walks whose grass was not even green, dwarfish, doddered leafless trees, and a luxuriant crop of nettles and weeds[...] It was the verdure of the churchyard, the garden of death. He turned for relief to the room but no relief was there, the wainscotting dark with dirt [...] the rusty grate [...], the crazy chairs, their torn bottom of rush drooping inward [...]. (Ibid., p.19; all cited in Claude Fierobe, The Big House and the Fantastic: From Architecture to Literature, That Other World: The Supernatural and Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts, ed. Bruce Stewart [Princess Grace Irish Library Series No. 12] 2 vols. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1998, Vol. 1, p.260.)
Leixlip Castle: An Irish Family Legend (1825): The tranquillity of the Catholics of Ireland during the disturbed periods of 1715 and 1745, was most commendable, and somewhat extraordinary; to enter into an analysis of their probable motives, is not at all the object of the writer of this tale, as it is pleasanter to state the fact of their honour, than at this distance of time to assign dubious and unsatisfactory reasons for it. Many of them, however, showed a kind of secret disgust at the existing state of affairs, by quitting their family residences and wandering about like persons who were uncertain of their homes, or possibly expecting better from some near and fortunate contingency. / Among the rest was a Jacobite Baronet, who, sick of his uncongenial situation in a Whig neighbourhood, in the north - where he heard of nothing but the heroic defence of Londonderry; the barbarities of the French generals; and the resistless exhortations of the godly Mr Walker, a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom the citizens gave the title of Evangelist; - quitted his paternal residence, and about the year 1720 hired the Castle of Leixlip for three years (it was then the property of the Connollys, who let it to triennial tenants); and removed thither with his family, which consisted of three daughters - their mother having long been dead. [...] (For full text, see RICORSO Library, Irish Classics, infra.) [ top ] |
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